Tuesday, May 19, 2009

I suppose I'm the last to become aware that Wolfram Alpha is the latest web thing to change the world. It's certainly hit the ground running. 'Is there a God?' I asked WA, hoping for the response, 'There is now.' But it was way ahead of me. 'Additional functionality for this topic is under development...' Witty or what? Humiliated, I returned to what I do best - reading Heather Mills on Twitter. 'Ooh just a thought while I remember to floss my teeth, let's get more in depth who are you, crusty 1, where were you born hairless heart.' Now that's what I call a new world.

12 comments:

When I asked Wolfram Alpha about God the reply was very clear: God is in Hungary. Maybe there's been a broadband outage in Hungary and the boffins have been unable to get any more information out of Him. Probably he's lying low, eating plenty of goulash and, just like you, is reading Heather Mills on Twitter. I guess the difference is that He'll soon turn out to have been writing Heather Mills on Twitter as well.

Hmm, while everyone else asked deep questions about God or themselves the first thing I typed was 'pi'. That was very cool. This morning I've been trying to find the mean and median salary for the UK. Hopeless. Horses for courses I guess

Ah, 'what is the meaning of life?' does give 42. I wanted to see if that had changed of late. Will it send you an email if so?

Brit, the verb seen twice yesterday on Twitter is Wolframed. Not enough to determine the future, I'm sure, but sounds the most likely verb, if one persists. (Alistair Cooke once opined on how difficult it is to coin even one new word that becomes widely used.) Striking that people are trying to verbalise it - except that means something different and I'd never spotted that synecdoche (if it is one, I'm now in deeper than I ever wanted to be!) I guess because it expands one's mental frontiers of what might be possible. But, for now, a curate's egg of an experience.

P.S. Only just read your Sunday article on the Web Bryan. Others have praised it here. I didn't find it entirely convincing. The key thing though is that I did read it. The critique in techdirt someone else pointed to I haven't bothered to delve into so deeply. Though flipping to the end of that, he does hit you correctly I feel on the mention of Murdoch's recent comments, which I also felt made for a weak ending.

Clive James and individualism is the centre of the piece for me. I became passionate about the wiki idea ten years ago precisely because of its strong community feel, compared to anything else I'd either experienced or indeed conceived possible on the Web. That was first-hand experience of the original wiki of Ward Cunningham's, well before Jimmy Wales of what became known as Wikipedia had ever heard of the term.

I think that community side, that comes of letting other people edit, share and link pages you have written, in a much deeper way than blogging, though not completely lost among the insiders of Wikipedia, has been neglected elsewhere and that it's important for the future of humanity. That's what I thought in 1999 and I feel the same today. But like all important and powerful things it doesn't always turn out to be easy to find the right balance to accommodate new people.

I'm not saying that web technology will inevitably be its own salvation or any utopian claptrap like that, which you rightly reject. I am saying that it's really important the shape it does take. A blog is an inadequate vehicle for these thoughts but thanks ever for the space to try and make the point.

I think it's going down the HAL route, sort of. It's obvious its makers haven't filled it in completely: it doesn't know who it is, or what colour it is (but does know where it is). Crucially, it doesn't know when Wolfram Beta is being released ...

A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.